Kenneth Clark's personal view of the ideas, arts, and achievements of Western man. Describes the dramatic emergence of the modern world in the Republic of Venice, the courts of Urbino and Mantua, and 14th-century Florence -- city of Medici, Donatello and Masaccio, Alberti and Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Botticelli, and Lorenzo the Magnificent. The age is characterized by man's rediscovey of his individuality.